Schoolmaster Quotes & Sayings

Pain is the best schoolmaster, as you will soon discover. — Joe Abercrombie

Yet the press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. — Henry Adams

The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of idle, gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. — Washington Irving

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself. — Walter Bagehot

John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster. — Graham Chapman

A man's religion is himself. If he is right-minded toward God, he is religious; if the Lord Jesus Christ is his schoolmaster, then he is Christianly religious. — Henry Ward Beecher

In Enlad," said Arren after a while, "we have a story about the boy whose schoolmaster
was a stone:'
"Aye? ... What did he learn?"
"Not to ask questions. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error — Thornton Wilder

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him. — Cormac McCarthy

The world no doubt is the best or most serviceable schoolmaster; but the world's curriculum does not include Latin and Greek. — E. V. Lucas

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that. — Franz Kafka

Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul.It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over pupils: he often beats them and insensibly he loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings.He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprising short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? — Patrick O'Brian

Lower the Law and you dim the light by which man perceives his guilt; this is a very serious loss to the sinner rather than a gain; for it lessens the likelihood of his conviction and conversion. I say you have deprived the gospel of its ablest auxiliary [its most powerful weapon] when you have set aside the Law. You have taken away from it the schoolmaster that is to bring men to Christ ... They will never accept grace till they tremble before a just and holy Law. Therefore the Law serves a most necessary purpose, and it must not be removed from its place. — Charles Spurgeon

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history. — H.G.Wells

The schoolmaster is termed, classically, Ludi Magister, because he deprives boys of their play. — Walter Scott

The most accomplished in the Scripture are fools, unless they acknowledge that they have need of God for their schoolmaster all the days of their life. — John Calvin

Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school. — Henry Sidgwick

There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother, but next in rank in efficacy is that of the schoolmaster. — Sarah Josepha Hale

One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation. — H.L. Mencken

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching. — George Bernard Shaw

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The role of the schoolmaster is to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board. — Edward Alsworth Ross

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life. — Horace

The village schoolmaster took us for instructive walks ('what you hear is the sound of a scythe being sharpened' ; 'that field there will be given a rest next season ';'oh, just a small bird...no special name '; 'if that peasant is drunk, it is because he is poor ') 71 — Vladimir Nabokov

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles' beards. Any noncommissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sherlock Holmes had listened with the utmost intentness to the statement of the unhappy schoolmaster. His drawn brows and the deep furrow between them showed that he needed no exhortation to concentrate all his attention upon a problem which, apart from the tremendous interests involved must appeal so directly to his love of the complex and the unusual. He now drew out his notebook and jotted down one or two memoranda. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What — Herman Melville

After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage. — H.G.Wells

Every schoolmaster after the age of forty-nine, is inclined to flatulence is apt to swallow frequently and to puff — Harold Nicolson

From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster
that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys. — Henry Adams

It is also the fate of leadership to be misunderstood. It is a grave error for any leader to be oversensitive in the face of criticism, to conduct discussions as if he or she is a schoolmaster talking to less informed and inexperienced learners. — Nelson Mandela

Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom. — Phillis Wheatley

I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance,
habit, which makes everything easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

God forgive me for having thought it possible that a schoolmaster could be out and out a rational being. — Walter Scott

The basic function of the government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and it's principal, characteristic and indispensable instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler - to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest of schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke. — Errico Malatesta

O give me new figures! I can't go on dancing The same that were taught me ten seasons ago; The schoolmaster over the land is advancing, Then why is the master of dancing so slow? It is such a bore to be always caught tripping In dull uniformity year after year; Invent something new, and you'll set me a skipping: I want a new figure to dance with my Dear! — Thomas Haynes Bayly

One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. — Thomas Paine

A first novel of astonishing force, craft and beauty, The Headmaster's Wager conjures up a dizzyingly evocative wartime Saigon in the story of Percival Chen, a Chinese schoolmaster in Vietnam. This extraordinary book made me weep. Read it. — Janice Y.K. Lee

If you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably! — William Makepeace Thackeray

When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really mean to say that at the moment when the Esquimaux has learnt to vote for a County Council, you will have learnt to spear a walrus? I recur to the example I gave. In Nicaragua we had a way of catching wild horses - by lassooing the fore feet - which was supposed to be the best in South America. If you are going to include all the talents, go and do it. If not, permit me to say what I have always said, that something went from the world when Nicaragua was civilised. — G.K. Chesterton

The Law of God in the Christian religion is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ. — Randall Terry

I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster. — Henry David Thoreau

Please be SILENT and LISTEN.
I am the SCHOOLMASTER
and you are in the CLASSROOM.
Just like ELEVEN PLUS TWO equals
TWELVE PLUS ONE,
And even a FUNERAL can be REAL FUN,
You will find my DICTIONARY
is quite INDICATORY.
If you want to read my story, just look ...
THEN UNREAD. — Pseudonymous Bosch

I neither drink nor smoke, because my schoolmaster impressed upon me three cardinal virtues; cleanliness in person, cleanliness in mind; temperance. — John Burns

I thought about how people seemed always to keep their distance. And how I always made sure to keep mine.

The schoolmaster, Mr. Henderson, had sanitized the door latch I'd touched. And Mr. Johnson, the postmaster, had wanted to sanitized my letter before he handled it. Two people slow to change. But the others?

I suppose I ought to think about them one by one. — Lauren Wolk

...the schoolmaster was one of those men for whom virtuous indignation was a necessity. — Gabriel Chevallier

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. — Henry Adams

I have always loved music; whoso has skill in this art, is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music, or I would not regard him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers, unless they have been well exercised in music — Martin Luther

Why are we never quite at ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? Because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. — Charles Lamb

The motto for every missionary, whether preacher, printer, or schoolmaster, ought to be 'Devoted for Life.' — Adoniram Judson

It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.

This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was "past keeping the pigs. — Florence Nightingale

Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world. — E. M. Forster

Though the continued march of intellect and education have nearly obliterated from the mind of the Scots a belief in the marvelous, still a love of the supernatural lingers among the more mountainous districts of the northern kingdom; for 'the Schoolmaster' finds it no easy task, even when aided by all the light of science, to uproot the prejudices of more than two thousand years. ("The Phantom Regiment") — James Grant

Poverty is the schoolmaster of character. — Antiphanes

Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free. — Erich Maria Remarque

A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster. — Henry George

I'm pretty well. So's the family, and so's the boys, except for a sort of rash as is a running through the school, and rather puts 'em off their feed. But it's a ill wind as blows no good to nobody; that's what I always say when them lads has a wisitation. A wisitation, sir, is the lot of mortality. Mortality itself, sir, is a wisitation. The world is chock full of wisitations; and if a boy repines at a wisitation and makes you uncomfortable with his noise, he must have his head punched. That's going according to the Scripter, that is. — Charles Dickens

Have they [the agnostics] produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. — G.K. Chesterton

When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far," and this was often the case. — Oliver Sacks

Don't you know that our belief in man's intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?" "What?" I exclaimed. "Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house keeper in the land and they will all tell you that men are much cleverer than women." "As if I doubted it," she said scornfully. "How could they help it? Haven't we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they're nothing else? It's all our doing!" she cried. — Virginia Woolf

Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has been the mother of all great inventions. — Orison Swett Marden

Where are you staying tonight?" Caleb asked reasonably. Lily had no idea; her mind had been so full of Caleb that she hadn't thought about that. Nor had she collected her savings from the bank in Tylerville or bought the equipment she would need to wash clothes. Although the schoolmaster's cottage was a cozy little place, it would require some preparation before she could move in. "You could spend the night with me," he suggested when Lily didn't answer his question. "I've been staying in the barracks, but I have a house." She glared at him. "Forget I said anything," Caleb sighed. And he turned the buggy toward the Tibbet place. — Linda Lael Miller

There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers. — James Russell Lowell

The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

Dear God, what she saw in that look! How he had hidden these many years behind the guise of a simple schoolmaster, she didn't know. Anger, passion, lust, and surging hunger swirled in his stormy eyes. Emotions so stark, so strong, she didn't understand how he kept them under control. He looked as if he were about to attack her, ravish her, and conquer London and the world itself. He could've been a warrior, a statesman, a king. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Don't you think," said Father Rothschild gently, "that perhaps it is all in some way historical? I don't think people ever want to lose their faith either in religion or anything else. I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all these divorces show that. People aren't content just to muddle along nowadays ... And this word "bogus" they all use ... They won't make the best of a bad job nowadays. My private schoolmaster used to say, "If a thing's worth doing at all, it's worth doing well." My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, and for all we know it may be the right one. They say, "If a thing's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing at all." It makes everything very difficult for them. — Evelyn Waugh

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping? — Woodrow Wilson

You're not paying attention to me, are you?"
"Eh? What's that? Sorry, love, I didn't hear you. Wasn't paying attention. I had my eyes on your perfectly formed arse."
Catherine fixed him with a glare worthy of a Scottish schoolmaster. "This is serious business Jamie. If you've to pass for a Highlander, you've got to get the kilt just so,"
"Bah! You're a hoydenish vixen. You just want to ogle my knees."
"Nonsense. I'm sure you'll find the ah... freedom and... utility very appealing once you try it on."
"You mean you think I'll like the feel of the family jewels waving free?" Blushing, she spread both great kilts on the ground. "One lays down on it like so. Oh stop grinning, Jamie, and do try."
She was so earnest and eager in her lesson that he hadn't the heart to tell her he'd worn a kilt a time or two before. — Judith James

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice. — Thomas Carlyle

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. — Charles Dickens

You may, if you are an old-fashioned schoolmaster, wish to consider yourself full of universal benevolence and at the same time derive great pleasure from caning boys. In order to reconcile these two desires you have to persuade yourself that caning — Bertrand Russell

we go to the bedroom now? I don't mind if you tell me off there, either. In fact, if you play the bossy schoolmaster I think that would bode well for our relationship. — Susan Mac Nicol

If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization. — Robert G. Ingersoll

Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me. — Stephen Fry

Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. — Jacques Ranciere

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory. — Marcel Proust